The Movie Mill
Work in Progress! Expect many more changes on their website!
Hosting
The Movie Mill is a very popular local website. It consistently tops 500 unique visitors daily (at the time of writing), and has a lot of loyal repeat visitors. We put them on our x3 plan, at $9 per month for bandwidth reasons.
Site Design
The Movie Mill's website design is meant to be simple, and easy to use. A lot of people from every demographic use it, so we wanted the desired information to be as accessible as possible. The "Web 2.0" look was accomplished with javascript loading a background-image after pageload. This means the markup is cleaner for 'bots to harvest useful information. We also consulted and aided in making their information less wordy, and more useful to the visitor. We wanted to give the pages some character, and we believe we accomplished that very well.
Dynamic Content
There are lots of things happening behind the scenes that most visitors might not know about.
- Menu highlighting to aid in navigation
- The contacts page is using our privacy contact script, which prevents web spiders from harvesting email addresses. In short, it protects their business email accounts from being overrun with spam. We have successfully reduced their spam from over 200 daily to about 10 weekly.
- A newsletter subscription manager was made, allowing viewers to subscribe and confirm their email addresses. This is an automated service, meaning they don't have to actively manage an email database. The newsletter also gracefully emails out according to web standards, using a queue system.
- An online interface for the website was made for them, meaning they can update their website from any computer with internet access. They can manage their film information database easily, and schedule times just by checking boxes. Once times are scheduled, their weekly newsletter is automatically generated for them, saving them lots of time! The entire interface was designed in a very simple, yet powerful manner. Lots of control, but no guesswork.
- The content on the website is updated automatically from the interface mentioned above. When Friday morning hits, the content refreshes itself to show the latest showtimes.
To sum up, we have made their website easy to update, and as time-saving as possible. More dynamic updates are on the way, including an advertising campaign manager!